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Trump grew up in a world of vast privilege, but that doesn't mean that he wasn't emotionally wounded. Now, once again, the world pays the price for this deeply damaged man.
I must admit, if Trump wasn't such a power-hungry demagogue, a danger to democracy, a sexual predator, racist, sociopath, pathological liar, bully, and impulsive and unstable megalomaniac, I might feel sorry for him.
He has no real friends, just sycophants. All his relationships are transactions, including with his three wives and his children. When people are no longer useful to him—wives, lawyers, advisors, Cabinet members—he discards them.
His current wife Melania is transactional, too. She married him for his money. She obviously doesn't love or respect him and she occasionally displays her disdain for him in public. She didn’t even campaign for him last year, except to make a few public appearances.
Trump hardly ever laughs. He has an almost-constant angry scowl on his face. To Trump, the world is a dark and foreboding place, where, like him, people are consumed by greed and lust. He relies on money and intimidation to get what he wants because he has no capacity for empathy or love—or any belief that people can be motivated by idealism and compassion.
Trump grew up in a world of vast privilege, but that doesn't mean that he wasn't emotionally wounded.
Both the federal raids on immigrants in Los Angeles and the upcoming military parade in Washington, D.C. reflect Trump’s need to look tough, manly, and in control.
According to his niece Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, he was bullied by his father, who must have told Donald that he wasn't smart and that he was (or should be worried about being) a loser. In 2017, 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts published a book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, warning that he was erratic and unstable as pressures mounted on him. Two years later, they updated the book—this time with 37 experts weighing in on Trump’s troubled mental health.
He has no strong beliefs about governing or public policy. His major motivations are money, power, revenge, racism, and adulation.
One of Trump’s few joys in life are the cheers from his fans at MAGA rallies. So, to compensate for his insecurities, feed his ego, and to mobilize his MAGA followers, he has planned this massive parade on June 14—today—ostensibly to celebrate the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday, but which also just happens to coincide with this 79th birthday. The plan is to include 6,600 soldiers, 150 vehicles, 50 helicopters, and seven military bands, and 34 horses—at a cost of about $50 million—money that could otherwise be spent on improving the lives of soldiers and military veterans. The event will require the closure of Ronald Reagan National Airport to accommodate flyovers and fireworks displays. Trump intends it as a display of force, domination, and personal power. It is more about him than about honoring our soldiers and veterans.
In U.S. history, large military parades have typically come at the end of wars as part of demobilizing troops and celebrating getting the country back to normal. But such spectacles have a long tradition in authoritarian countries, where dictators, including the current rulers of Russian and North Korea, seek to bind themselves to national identity. The most disreputable of these displays of dominance were the mass rallies and parades organized by the Nazis to celebrate Adolf Hitler, depicted in Leni Riefenstahl’s pathbreaking propaganda film “Triumph of the Will,” that celebrated Hitler speaking at a massive Nazi Party rally in Nurenberg in 1934.
Having won a second term, Trump is now wants to consolidate his grip on power. He’s sought to bend those whom he views as his critics and opponents—universities, media companies, law firms, judges, businesses, scientists, artists and performers, and even professional sports teams—to his will. Both the federal raids on immigrants in Los Angeles and the upcoming military parade in Washington, D.C. reflect Trump’s need to look tough, manly, and in control.
From his father, who was arrested at a Klan rally in 1927, he also absorbed the racist ideas of the fake science of eugenics, which was popular in America in the early 1900s.
In 1988, he told Oprah Winfrey that a person had “to have the right genes” in order to achieve great fortune. In 2010, he told CNN that he was a “gene believer,” explaining that “when you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse.” He compared his own “gene pool” to that of successful thoroughbreds. During a 2020 campaign speech to a crowd of white supporters in Minnesota, Trump said, “You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? You have good genes in Minnesota.”
But in fact, Trump has thus always been insecure about his family's genes. His father lied about his family's heritage, pretending that the Trumps were from Swedish, not German, ancestry. Trump repeated the lie in his book, The Art of the Deal. (He later said that he wouldn't mind if the US had more immigrants from Scandinavia, but kept out immigrants from "shithole countries," an outrageously racist comment). Trump said at a rally in Iowa that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of the country. They're destroying the fabric of our country, and we're going to have to get them out."
Trump believes that most white Americans share his racism toward immigrants and that he can weaponize that hatred by carrying out a mass deportation of people he calls “illegal” and “criminals.” He’s sent federal agents to Los Angeles to arrest immigrant workers and parents, followed by National Guard troops to intimidate and arrest those who are protesting the anti-immigrant raids. This is all designed to create fear and chaos to give Trump cover as the “law and order” president and, as Rep. Laura Friedman (D-CA) noted, “an excuse to declare martial law in California.” The timing is no accident. The federal raids—which Trump is likely to expand to other cities—are meant to divert public attention from Trump’s legislative plan to cut Medicaid and other essential programs in order to give a huge tax cut to the super-rich.
Trump often claims that he's a self-made billionaire. In fact, he inherited his father's wealth, as reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig explain in their 2024 book, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success. His father bankrolled his developments and bailed him out when they failed. Despite his boasts, he knows that most of his business ventures—his casinos, hotels, golf courses, fake university, airline, football team, clothing line, steaks, and others—failed. Most banks won't go near Trump, because they consider him a toxic grifter who consistently defrauds his subcontractors, employees, and lenders. According to Forbes magazine—which ranks the world’s billionaires—Trump was never as wealthy as he claimed to be.
The timing is no accident. The federal raids—which Trump is likely to expand to other cities—are meant to divert public attention from Trump’s legislative plan to cut Medicaid and other essential programs in order to give a huge tax cut to the super-rich.
Trump's favorite insults, directed toward people he considers his enemies, are "not smart" and "losers." Clearly the man is projecting.
Trump was terrified of losing last year’s election because he might have had to go to prison and also because he'd be viewed as a "loser," which in his mind is the worst thing you can be, a consequence of his father's disparagement and his mother's neglect. He was doubly worried that he might lose to a Black woman, Kamala Harris, whom he described as “not smart.”
Trump is clearly insecure about his mental abilities and worries that it's due to his inferior genes. He’s boasted that he comes from a superior genetic stock and that he is a "very stable genius." For years, he has constantly insisted that "I'm smart." “Throughout my life,” Trump tweeted in 2018, “my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.” He lied about being first in his class in college. He didn't even make the Dean's List. Whenever he has defended his intelligence, it isn't clear if he's trying to convince his interviewers or himself.
He’s even defensive about his vocabulary. He claims to have "great words," although linguists who have studied his speeches and other statements say he has the vocabulary of an adolescent. He doesn't read—for pleasure or work. As president, he doesn’t read the memos prepared for him by his staff, including intelligence briefs. Some observers attributed this to his arrogance. But more likely it is because he can’t understand what is in them. He'd rather be considered arrogant than stupid.
At least 26 of his top aides publicly said that Trump was unfit to be president. They questioned his competence, character, impulsiveness, narcissism, judgement, intelligence, and even his sanity.
According to Michael Wolff, in his book, Fire and Fury, both former chief of staff Reince Priebus and ex-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called Trump an “idiot.” Trump’s one-time economic adviser Gary Cohn said Trump was “dumb as shit.” His national security adviser H.R. McMaster described the president as a “dope.” In July 2017, news stories reported that Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State, called the president a “moron.” When asked, he did not deny using that term. In an interview with Foreign Affairs magazine, Tillerson recounted that Trump’s “understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of U.S. history was really limited.” He said, “It’s really hard to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t even understand the concept for why we’re talking about this.”
“Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States,” said his former Vice President, Mike Pence. Mark Esper, one of Trump’s Defense Secretaries, said that Trump is not “fit for office because he puts himself first, and I think anybody running for office should put the country first.” In his farewell speech, Mark Milley, a retired Army general who served as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from October 1, 2019, to September 30, 2023, warned “We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator,” clearly referring to Trump. John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps four-star general who served as chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, said that Trump “admires autocrats and murderous dictators” and “has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”
Soon after the January 6, 2021 insurrection, McMaster, the former national security advisor, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Trump had incited the riot through “sustained disinformation… spreading these unfounded conspiracy theories.” He accused Trump of “undermining rule of law.” Sarah Matthews, deputy White House press secretary during Trump’s first term, witnessed Trump staffers trying, without success, to get the president to condemn the January 6 violence. “In my eyes, it was a complete dereliction of duty that he did not uphold his oath of office,” she toldUSA Today. “I lost all faith in him that day” and resigned from her job. Trump’s “continuation of pushing this lie that the election is stolen has made him wholly unfit to hold office every again,” Matthews said.
What kind of president invites the media to attend Cabinet meetings where each member is required to humiliate themselves by telling Trump how wonderful he is?
But let's give Trump some credit. He does have the kind of intelligence, sometimes called "street smarts," attributed to hustlers, con men, and grifters. That seems to have worked for him.
Trump knows that many Republicans in Congress laugh at him behind his back but don't say anything in public because they fear him—particularly his ability to find candidates to run against them in the GOP primaries.
He also knows that most world leaders don't respect him. We’ve now been witness to the ritualized Oval Office meetings between Trump and his counterparts, where Trump seeks to bully, coerce, and humiliate them. A few have challenged him, which gets him angry enough to seek revenge. His meetings with Putin are somewhat different, since he envies the Russian autocrat’s power. Trump’s bromance and recent break-up with Elon Musk is partly about policy but mostly a battle of egos and wills.
What kind of person craves being famous for telling people, "You're fired"? But that's how he became a TV celebrity. What kind of president invites the media to attend Cabinet meetings where each member is required to humiliate themselves by telling Trump how wonderful he is? To Trump, respect is a zero-sum game. He likes to demean others to boost himself.
Trump will try, and fail, to cancel the 2028 elections and remain in power. But don't expect him to fade away. He will seek to become the leader of a white nationalist supremacist movement while continuing to dominate the Republican Party. The MAGA forces he’s unleashed since 2016 will also still be around. It is no accident that racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic incidents have spiked since Trump began campaigning for president. Trump verbalizes, encourages, enables, tolerates, winks at, and makes excuses for hate groups, most notably when he said that some of the Nazis marching in Charlottesville in 2017 were “good people.”
WhenTrump dies from the side effects of obesity, the nation and the world will breathe a huge sigh of relief.
But as he gets crazier and crazier, and no longer has the power of the presidency, most of his followers will abandon him, crowds at his rallies will be smaller and smaller, and he’ll become a lonely, decrepit old man, a fallen idol like the Orson Welles character (Charles Kane) in the 1941 film "Citizen Kane" and the Andy Griffith character (Lonesome Rhodes) in the 1957 film "A Face in the Crowd."
He'll retreat to Mar-a-Lago—his Xanadu—by himself and with his paid staff. Or perhaps he'll spend much of his remaining years in federal prison, seething over how he was the victim of conspiracies.
WhenTrump dies from the side effects of obesity, the nation and the world will breathe a huge sigh of relief. And while he can't quite admit it to himself, he knows it, and it terrifies him.
Because we don’t see Palestinians as fully human, we fail to understand how destroying their lives, denying them a normal present and a hopeful future can result in deformities in their sense of self.
One thing of which we can be certain is that there will be consequences to the genocide in Gaza.
It is difficult to wrap one’s arms around the excruciating pain being endured by Palestinians in Gaza. We only know the rough outline of the devastation. Tens of thousands have been murdered in aerial bombardments, over 100,000 have sustained serious injuries, the majority of homes have been demolished, and, as a result of Israel’s blockade, mass starvation is impacting more than one and one-half million people. In addition, hospitals and schools have been destroyed, and other essential services to provide support for births, illnesses, deaths and grieving, and treatment of the psychological wounds of war have been largely terminated.
We know that most of the dead and wounded are civilians, with the majority being women and children. We also know that upwards of 4,000 people have lost limbs. And many wounded children are the only survivors in their families, making them maimed orphans without a support network.
If we don’t demonstrate compassion and implement a comprehensive approach to rebuilding Gaza and restoring a sense of wholeness to its people, I fear what the future may have in store.
I’ve written before about the indecency of those “day after” discussions that focus exclusively on matters of governance or bricks-and-mortar while ignoring the human dimension and long-term consequences of this conflict. Of course, those governing and reconstruction issues are important, and it is gratifying that working papers are being developed to address them. But building housing and infrastructure and creating administrative structures should not be the sole considerations; attention must also be paid to addressing and healing the physical and psychological wounds of this war.
Consider the psychic wounds experienced by Gaza’s children. We know that significant losses produce trauma. Losing a parent, a sibling, or a friend, or even just moving to a new neighborhood can be unsettling and have an impact on behavior or mental stability. We also know that the degree of the shock can be mitigated by other factors. For example: the discomfort experienced by a child when their family moves to a new city and the child loses friends and a familiar environment can be somewhat offset by a supportive family.
But what if, as is the case in Gaza, your family has lost many loved ones (parents, children, and close extended family members), been forced to move multiple times, and is now living in a tent without food or water? And then imagine that during the last cease-fire, children, already traumatized by loss, joined the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians making the long trek northward to their old homes. What they find upon arrival is that not only their home but also their entire neighborhood is rubble and unrecognizable. And then they are forced to deal with hunger and the indignity of witnessing their parents begging for food.
We know that as we grow our brains organize our experiences so that they sense to us. We develop a mental map of our relationships and our place in the world in which we live. But what if, in the case of a 12-year-old returning to Gaza City, they find that there is no home, and the way to school, the neighborhood store, a friend’s home, or the mosque or school have all have been erased. The compounding of multiple losses and extreme dislocation can only be seen as profoundly traumatizing. Under these circumstances it is impossible to calculate the severity of the impact on this child’s well-being or future development. What will become of them, their older siblings, and their parents? How will their brains ingest and make sense of all of these losses?
Given the seriousness of this situation, it becomes imperative not only to end the conflict and make plans for reconstruction and governance, but also to create strategies to address psychic and developmental needs as well. The U.S. press focuses on the need to address the trauma of those young Israelis who’ve been held hostage in Gaza. This is obviously needed, but what is disturbing is the extent to which we’ve ignored the trauma experienced by Palestinians in Gaza. Why? In a word, racism.
Because we don’t see Palestinians as fully human, we fail to understand how destroying their lives, denying them a normal present and a hopeful future can result in deformities in their sense of self. If we don’t demonstrate compassion and implement a comprehensive approach to rebuilding Gaza and restoring a sense of wholeness to its people, I fear what the future may have in store.
Even now, neither Israel nor the U.S. have shown any interest in addressing the humanity of Palestinians and instead are advancing plans that see this much beleaguered people reduced to pawns to be moved about to help Israel achieve its goals.
The solution must come from a forceful and united stand taken by Arabs and key European states to sanction Israel for its crimes, force them to evacuate Gaza, and end their occupation of Palestinian lands. Then and only then, under an international mandate, can reconstruction begin that will rebuild Gaza and help to heal the wounds of the Palestinian victims of this war.
If we do not take this course, there will be hell to pay as the bitter seeds being planted today will be bearing fruit in future generations.
For $40 billion-worth of health cuts to come as our government wants to spend $45 billion to become Amazon-efficient at shipping human beings to foreign prisons is establishing this nation as a beacon of cruelty.
The Trump administration wants to spend $45 billion to build an inhumane deportation industry while planning to cut at least $40 billion in life-saving programs from the Department of Health and Human Services. The juxtaposition is a near-perfect gauge of how heartless our government has become in the richest nation on Earth.
For deportation, the administration virtually froths for an Amazon-like fulfillment center to robotically sort out handcuffed humans and shuffle them down the aisles onto trucks and planes.
Todd Lyons, the acting director of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), recently told private security companies seeking contracts that ICE needs to be “like Amazon, trying to get your product delivered in 24 hours… trying to figure out how to do that with human beings and trying to get them pretty much all over the globe is really something for us.”
So far, all that the government is proving is how cruel it is in running roughshod over due process to separate children from parents and deport U.S. citizen children, including one with late-stage cancer.
That is really something, on many levels. One is the sheer immorality of reducing humans to shrink-wrapped products to shove onto conveyor belts and stack on forklifts. Another is that so far, ICE is as indiscriminate and incompetent as Amazon is efficient. President Donald Trumppromised “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.” Border czar Tom Homan said the United States government was “targeting the worst of the worst” for deportation.
Instead, there have been notorious incidents of students being rounded up for exercising their right to free speech and deportations of untold numbers of people without U.S. criminal records. One recent notorious case is that of 238 mostly Venezuelan migrants deported to prisons in El Salvador; Bloomberg Newsfound that only about 10% of them had a criminal record in the United States. The legality of many deportations is highly questionable, as the White House has defied court orders to turn back deportation planes and return wrongly deported people back to the United States
According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, founded at Syracuse University, ICE issued 18,000 “detainer” requests for local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies to hold people for possible deportation in the first month of the new Trump administration. That was more than triple the detainers issued in the first full month of the Biden administration, which faced its own fierce criticism from immigration rights advocates.
ICE says detainers are mostly for people who have been convicted of burglaries and robberies, kidnapping, homicide, sexual assault, weapons offenses, drug trafficking, and human trafficking. But only 28% of people targeted by a detainer in the first month of the new Trump administration had a prior conviction in the United States, with the most frequent offenses involving drunk driving and other traffic violations.
As for the “worst of the worst,” just one half of 1% of detainers involved a convicted rapist or murderer. So far, all that the government is proving is how cruel it is in running roughshod over due process to separate children from parents and deport U.S. citizen children, including one with late-stage cancer.
That the nation would spend $45 billion on this malicious ruination of lives and destruction of families looks even more unconscionable when President Trump and Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. want to cut $40 billion from a department that says its mission is to “enhance the health and well-being of all Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services.”
A review of the proposed cuts—as detailed in a 64-page memorandum that was leaked to the media—shows how profoundly the Trump administration is about to betray that mission.
The administration would end the HIV Epidemic Initiative, even though nearly 5,000 people a year in the United States still die with HIV/AIDS as the underlying cause. Despite many advances in HIV treatment that allow patients longer lives, there were still 38,000 HIV diagnoses in 2022, half of them in Southern states. While 1 in 5 people in the United States with HIV are still not able to access treatment.
The administration would kill the Minority AIDS Initiative, even though the disease is rife with gross racial disparities. Though African Americans are 12% of the nation’s population, they accounted for 37% of new HIV diagnoses in 2022.
The cuts would eliminate the division of Firearm Injury and Mortality Research. In doing so, the administration is imposing an ignorance that will likely further paralyze any debate on gun control, since the division’s mission is to provide data “to inform action” on a major cause of death in the United States. Last year, then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory declaring gun violence an “urgent public health crisis,” as gun deaths soared to a record 48,830 in 2021.
All this raises real questions of how people in this nation could needlessly die if the HHS cuts become real in the areas of gun safety, mental health, food safety, HIV, or nursing.
New research funded by HHS’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that emergency rooms were receiving a gunshot victim every 30 minutes in nine Southern and Western states and the District of Columbia. Even though murders have subsided somewhat from a record 21,000 in 2021 during the Covid-19 crisis, gun suicides kept rising to a record 27,300 in 2023.
Yet, HHS has scrubbed Murthy’s advisory from its website.
The Youth Violence Division would also be eliminated, even though gun deaths are the leading cause of death for youth under 18, killing 2,500 kids a year. Due to the Trump administration’s demands to end equity across all public policy, HHS proposes to eliminate the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. More than half of Black youth who die before the age of 18 are victims of gun violence, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Black youth are six times more likely to die a gun death than white youth.
Besides the 27,300 gun suicides in 2023, another 22,000 suicides occurred that year from other methods, primarily suffocation and intentional poisoning. About another 100,000 people died in 2022 from unintentional overdoses of fentanyl, methamphetamine, prescription opioids, cocaine, heroin, and other substances.Yet, despite the approximately 150,000 combined deaths a year from suicides and overdoses, President Trump and Secretary Kennedy propose to eliminate dozens of mental health and substance abuse training and treatment programs for children, families, people of color, people in the criminal justice system, first responders, community recovery support, and crisis response.
As if the Flint Water Crisis never happened, HHS under the Trump administration would end the Childhood Lead Poisoning Program and the Lead Exposure Registry. That is despite a 2022 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal that showed half of the U.S. population was exposed to high levels of lead in early childhood, and a 2016 Reutersanalysis that 3,000 communities across the nation had higher lead levels than Flint. A 2022 study found that without stronger congressional action to protect children from the brain damage of lead exposure, the nation will “needlessly absorb” about $80 billion in annual costs to the nation’s economy, double the proposed cuts to HHS.
HHS would end the direct involvement of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in routine inspections of food facilities, trusting an uneven patchwork of state vigilance on bacteria, parasites, and viruses in our food systems. Never mind that the CDC says there are 48 million cases of foodborne illness every year, costing 3,000 lives and requiring 128,000 hospitalizations. A study last year done by researchers from U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Colorado School of Public Health found that food illnesses cost the nation $75 billion a year in medical care, lost productivity, premature deaths, and ongoing chronic illnesses.
Yet, HHS wants to cut $40 billion from the budget.
The Trump administration and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, have disingenuously stated that funding and eliminations of departments are targeting waste and fraud. One need not be a math major to see that what they propose is the opposite.
For instance, the cuts would eliminate the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, even though cancer, heart disease, and stroke kill more than 1.5 million people a year in the United States, and cost the nation hundreds of billions of dollars a year in healthcare costs and lost productivity. Many of those diseases, along with diabetes and obesity, are often preventable, and the national center has been a resource for programs to reduce smoking, promote physical activity, lower alcohol intake, and improve nutrition.
The administration wants to eliminate the National Institutes for Nursing Research and several other nursing programs. This is in the face of studies that show that lower nurse-to-patient ratios and lower patient waiting times (because of more nurses) can save a hospital a couple of million dollars a year. It is also in the face of a 2021 study that found that in New York state alone, lower nurse-to-patient ratios could save more than 4,000 lives and more than $700 million over a two-year period.
The administration is so heartless that it even wants to eliminate its program for drowning, even though 4,500 people a year perish underwater, even though it is the top cause of death for preschoolers, and even though 55% of U.S. adults have never taken a swim lesson.
All this raises real questions of how people in this nation could needlessly die if the HHS cuts become real in the areas of gun safety, mental health, food safety, HIV, or nursing. It should be unfathomable that the nation would let its guard down after Flint, risking stunted brain development in untold children.
For these $40 billion-worth of cuts to come at the same time our government wants to spend $45 billion to become Amazon-efficient at shipping human beings “all over the globe” to foreign prisons is establishing this nation as a beacon of cruelty in the developed world. The government wants a conveyor belt of deportation as it dismantles health systems in the name of efficiency.
That would be quite the fulfillment center. Immigrants are forklifted into misery. The rest of us are being carted into a cavalier world by a government that clearly does not care how many people die.